It was a voice heard ‘round the internet. With a simple, impossibly catchy plea to “toss a coin to your Witcher,” Joey Batey’s turn as the bard Jaskier in the Netflix adaptation of The Witcher became an overnight sensation. The role was a perfect storm for the Cambridge-educated actor, merging a deep-seated theatrical training—honed at Paris’s L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq—with an innate musicality. But the swaggering, scene-stealing minstrel is only one side of the story. Before he was charming Continent royalty, Batey was treading the boards with the Royal Shakespeare Company and taking on roles in series like the historical drama Knightfall. The global recognition that came with a viral song was less a beginning and more a convergence of two parallel paths he had long been walking.

The other path winds through darker, more melancholic territory with his indie-folk band, The Amazing Devil. Formed in 2015 with collaborator Madeleine Hyland, the project is Batey’s primary vehicle for songwriting. He once described their sound as music that “sad people can listen to at train stations,” a world away from Jaskier’s upbeat ditties. Albums like The Horror and the Wild and Ruin reveal a lyricist drawn to dense, narrative-driven songs that grapple with love and ruin. This creative impulse extends beyond music into prose, with a debut novel titled It’s Not a Cult, a darkly comic folk-horror story. Between the stage, the screen, and the recording studio, Batey has crafted a career defined not by one breakout role, but by a restless, multifaceted artistic identity.